This first chapter has one primary objective: It provides an overview of Canadian Baptist fundamentalism as a historical and theological movement from 1878–1978. This is no easy task. As the reader will soon discover, the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement was complex, full of ebbs and flows, both linear and circular, at times unified and at other times fragmented, sometimes in the limelight and often on the periphery, and driven by certainties and rerouted by contingencies. It is impossible to capture every change, challenge, controversy, expression, and nuance in this short chapter. Still, the account offered in the next few pages includes an historical analysis and key events, personalities, and developments that shaped the first one hundred years of the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement.

Absolute chronologies are always suspect, because social, cultural, and theological developments and movements do not always fit neatly into a rigid timeframe. Still, John Fea identifies four approximate phases in the development of American fundamentalism (1) an “irenic phase,” which runs from approximately 1893–1919 and serves as a harbinger to fundamentalism “proper”; (2) a “militant phase,” that runs from 1920–1936 and which encompasses the now famous “fundamentalist-modernist controversies”; (3) a “divisive phase” from 1941–1960, associated with the intramural fragmentation of fundamentalism into “evangelical” and “separatist” factions; and (4) a “separatist phase” from 1960 to the present, in which the term fundamentalism is applied to those Protestants who choose to remove themselves from the mainstream of American culture and religion.39 These phases are certainly helpful for understanding in broad terms the development of American fundamentalism.

Another significant recent study of the origins and development of the American fundamentalist movement is provided by Kevin Bauder and Robert Delnay. This insider history offers a sympathetic perspective on the American Baptist fundamentalist movement.40 Both men have a long history as participants, researchers, and observers. In their volume entitled, One in Hope and Doctrine: Origins of Baptist Fundamentalism 1870–1950, Bauder and Delnay provide a detailed chronological account of the emergence of fundamentalism in the Northern Baptist Convention and especially the theological controversies and schisms of the 1920s and 1930s. The contributions of Regular, Conservative, and Southern Baptists are also thoroughly examined. Among many other contentions and conclusions, Bauder and Delany argue that American fundamentalists were identified by five marks: “devotion to the Scripture,” “the hope of an any-moment return of Christ,” “separation, both from apostasy and the world,” “an attitude of conviction, even militancy,” and “a genuine devotion to Christ.”41 These marks, they argue, formed the core of the American Baptist fundamentalist identity.

As useful as these American studies are, they do not specifically address the Canadian Baptist context. In this context three approximate phases in the first one hundred years of the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement are discernable: a Formative Phase, 1878–1918; a Fight and Fragmentation Phase, 1919–1945; and a Decline and New Forms Phase, 1946–1978.